LA GRANDE, Oregon—The feel of a flower petal evokes a mood for a poem. The smell of cinnamon unearths a memory for reflecting on in a journal. But for Sharon Porter and her fifth- and sixth-graders, it is sound—and sound effects—that provides the stimulus for creating stories, and an audio backdrop when stories are told by their student authors. "Our writing 'performances' are reminiscent of the golden days of radio," she enthuses.

Porter teaches English, music and library media at Island City Elementary in rural Island City, an isolated community of 800 residents near the town of La Grande, in the desert high-country of northeast Oregon. Porter likens her students' audio writing experience to listening to old-time radio, because of the way radio inspires visual pictures and memories in the mind.

"Our eyes perceive images, in order to paint pictures on a canvas," she says. "But modern humans are often too dependent on visual stimulus, in my experience," she relates. (Porter has been teaching for 30 years.) "The practice of just sitting and listening is becoming a lost activity, and this project shows how something simple, like sound, inspires our senses and our ability to express ourselves."

Porter has her students listen to sound effects like jungle birds, train whistles, the sea, and so on from audio CDs played on a DVD player. As they listen, they write down the track number of the sounds that particularly spark a mood or excite a sensory memory. From those memories and ideas, students then compose a short, three- or four-paragraph piece of writing using word processing software.

In a fascinating, technologically creative twist, students create an audio score that supports their public reading presentations. Students build this score by entering the audio track numbers from their CDs into a software program that produces, of all things, barcodes like those found on food packages. Older students use graphics software to copy and paste the barcodes into their written story, then print it out. Younger students are more comfortable using scissors to cut and then tape barcodes into their printed text. (According to Porter, younger students aren't always ready, developmentally, to integrate the barcode into the text electronically). Once students complete their stories and insert their barcodes, it's showtime!

Students "buddy up," and head to the front of the class. The excitement mounts as a presentation begins. While one student reads his or her story, another grasps a barcode-reading wand (which is connected to the DVD player that holds the original audio CDs), and follows along. When the first student reads a scene or moment they've imagined, the second student waves the wand across the barcode located by that part of the story. The wand reads the barcode, triggering the CD to play a particular audio track, and voila-a sound or sound effect plays to the class. Students hear the story dramatized as if it was scored to a movie soundtrack.

Children love the exercise, reports Porter. "I never tire of the wonder of what these students create. The tools we offer them to access information, make sense of it, and present it back to show understanding and application are astounding!"

Island Elementary supports this kind of creativity for its 160 students, offering nine computers with Internet access, plus scanners, a TV projection system, digital cameras and individual keyboarding units. A traveling laptop lab visits the school monthly. Library services are automated and the card catalog is available on the Internet, letting students access Web periodical databases from school and from home. About 40 percent of students have home computers, Porter estimates.

While she values the simple rural setting, Porter appreciates the link that these technology tools let her establish between her students and distant cities. "We're geographically remote—Boise is three hours away, Portland four hours. So we need technology to keep us in touch and freely receiving information about the world."

However, the project's simplicity and emphasis on listening has in some cases softened some students' desire to experience the often-frenzied music and sounds of big city living. "In the writing of our stories, we discovered that the violent sounds that once were appealing to some of our students, are now a bit disturbing," Porter explains. "We talked about it with the children and many agreed that violence is not a place we want to go to as writers right now, especially after the September 11, 2001 attacks in America."

Using technology to teach is making a difference for Porter, too, after all these years. "I've taught library media for a long time in every configuration of school: kindergarten through university, rural, inner-city, private and public school, " she reveals.

"Yet I've never felt more alive professionally than today."